There are a lot of misguided beliefs about the Medieval period arising from a popular Gothic/Romantic revival in the 19th century. The period became known by another name - "the Dark Ages" - and was seen as dark, mysterious, and primitive. That completely got wrong what the Medieval period really was - the transition from Roman imperial rule to early-modern European states, and a small industrial revolution in technology including agriculture and navigation.
The popular view of all-powerful, romantic nobility and dumb peasants also comes from this mischaracterization. In reality, the period's instability after the Roman empire fell really made kings and nobles more akin to local warlords playing at Roman customs, and there were exceptions to the rule like prosperous city-republics. Peasant life was also sophisticated, rational, and complex, completely attuned to local weather and crop cycles. A good blog series goes into detail about this here:
The important thing to realize is that no matter how difficult it was, how long ago it occurred, and how foreign the customs were for a certain period, people are still people. They have emotions, worries, good days, and struggles. If you take things in perspective and empathize with the people that preceded you on this world, history will lose a lot of its mystery.
is a good post about that, and the Dark Ages myth. There's a lot of propaganda from this time period that people still believe today because it was used to justify a lot of the European nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Yep, the 30 years war was one of the bloodiest. most devastating conflicts in human history, and had more political twists and turns than a George RR Martin novel.
The atrocities and genocides that Europeans brought to the world for centuries should be focused on deeply. Context: I am European and disgusted with the way we treat our impact on the world.
I think among the most striking examples here aside from the obvious one (Holocaust), is Belgium, because it just seems to slip under a lot of people's radar. Belgium has an evil, brutal and vile history, especially in relation to its colonialism and the included human rights violations which in my opinion are massive compared to the country's size and geopolitical abilities.
Belgian citizens are oblivious, but at least slowly "waking up" as the BBC calls it [1]. To be clear, it's the system and leadership that I struggle with. Not the citizens.
To this day, Belgian schools do not in any way teach that Belgium is solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide in the early 90s. It was the sick Belgians who separated fake ethnic groups in Rwanda in the first place, depending on how ethnically white the shape of your skull appeared. And later they used these synthetic groups for political purposes and control.
The Belgian government/leadership has a long history of inhuman behavior, violence and murder that goes nearly completely ignored within Europe and it sort of rubs me the wrong way. Guy Verhofstadt said 'I beg your pardon' once in Rwanda, and that was basically it. 800,000+ are dead and Belgium says 'sorry' once. What?
Belgium isn't about chocolate, it's a country which is completely fine with not teaching its citizens about the common practice of chopping off children's arms for not meeting labor goals for the day. When Belgians travel to places like Rwanda they are dumbfounded by the realities of their own history.
And those people want to tell China something about human rights, yelling from some tower in Brussels. It's breathtaking.
I 100% agree with you. As a Polish-American, Leopold II is what I lean on when someone tries to pretend Europe has clean hands from atrocities... which I've personally met here in the US. They seem to act like the US invented atrocities.
But I disagree with you on the other spectrum. Mostly how the argument is presented. "If only those nasty Europeans never existed, the world would be at peace". Yea, no. Every civilization, whether Asian, Persian, African, Pacific Islands, pre-European native Americans and everyone else I missed were perfectly cool with destroying some other tribe/clan/city. Hell, Hawaiians were a very warrior centric culture before Cook arrived.
We suck as humans. Doesn't matter where you were born, you suck because you're a human. No one's hands are clean. Pointing at one culture as the cause of the world's problems doesn't solve much and just spins the wheels of hate and war some more. And hey, dont get me wrong, when Merkel has negative things to say about how Poland and the US conducts themselves, the first thing I always think of, "Really chancellor kraut?". It is laughable when Brussels or Berlin or London or DC wants to take the moral high road. However, at some point we have to cut our losses and just quit being douches to each other or we are forever doomed to repeat the bad parts to history.
On a more serious note tho, I particularly don't like the mixing of people and time. For example: There is no point in accusing German people for the war crimes of WWII when they were born decades later.
It does make a bit more sense when you look at current (war) crimes of your country (or collective in general) tho, but the extent to which you are to blame is probably still very very low (but not zero) and gets lower the bigger the collective is, if you have (close to) no political power.
I have the same experience. Growing up in Greek schools, we learn early about our 'great ancestors', but every depiction is with rose coloured glasses.
We are not taught about the atrocities of our ancestors and how the Greece the 'mother of all cultures' was infact filled with traitors and slavery, especially Athens.
Our 'great' past is ,beat, almost literally into our heads. We named one of the worst warlords in history 'Great' and instead of talking about the slavery and death he brought, we call it 'liberation of the barbarians', with 'barbarians'
meaning all who are not greeks (::winky face::).
When it came to the Romans, we were still the winners because conquered them with our culture.
The worst of all is that this becomes so ingrown, even in young people, that for many it becomes a corner-store of their identity; any critical discussion is met with attacks because it literally shakes the foundation of their world.
There were two distinct tribes in Rwanda, the Tutsi and the Hutus. It's quite common for some Africans to identify by tribe.
There is a great/depressing book by a UN general who was in Rwanda at the time. [0]
> human rights violations
To be pedantic, there were no human rights violations as there was really no legal concept of human rights at all. The what-is-now Chinese were slaughtering each other long before any White Man set foot in the place.
No, exactly these tribes were invented (as culturally/ racially distinct) by the colonial rulers, first German, then Belgian. Interestingly this is part of the German wikipedia article, but not the English speaking one: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruanda#Ethnische_Zusammensetzu...
Edit: It is mentioned a bit in the article about the Hamite theory (a racist theory that formed the academic legitimization for many colonial decisions in Africa): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamites
I'm glad someone has said this. Looking at the West from my corner of the world these days, it feels like all the evil in this world was invented in Europe and propagated throughout the world via imperialism.
I've had heated debates with friends just trying to explain that people are people, and they do mean things to each other. Sometimes. Often, actually.
It's called "noble savage" stereotype. The type of condescending that feels like anti-racism, but is actually just another form of racism.
(Similar to other types of condescension-masquerading-as-respect, such as "women are too pure to debate politics".)
The funny thing is that the person who expressed this usually strongly believes it is genuine respect, and will get outraged if you suggest otherwise. Like, is there a higher compliment than to be treated like a child? But at the same time, we do not consider children competent, and we feel comfortable making the important decisions for them.
I highly recommend some history of imperial China and its expansion in the SEA region. ("the lords of the rim"[1], or perhaps anything from James C Scott[2]). Read this together with Jacques Ellul "Betrayal of the West"[3] for a radically different view that will probably have your head spinning.
> Belgian schools do not in any way teach that Belgium is solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide
Making the cackhanded pre-1970s Belgian administration "solely" responsible for the 1993 genocide is an exceptionally unorthodox (i.e. stupid) hot take, so it's no wonder that no school is teaching it.
That's comparable to claiming the the US, British and French are "solely" responsible for the Holocaust because they forced Germany to sign the Versailles treaty. Yes it might have played a role, but it's clearly ridiculous.
Belgium might not be solely responsible but to say its role is just marginal is also preposterous. Dividing people arbitrarily into two groups explicitly to do divide-and-rule is what ended up with the genocide. They're not responsible only insofar as not realising the true ramifications of the evil deeds they did.
> To this day, Belgian schools do not in any way teach that Belgium is solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide in the early 90s. It was the sick Belgians who separated fake ethnic groups in Rwanda in the first place, depending on how ethnically white the shape of your skull appeared.
Not only is this factually untrue - perhaps Belgians highlighted ethnic divisions between the two Bantu peoples, but they did not create them - how about you leave the peoples of Rwanda some agency? Nobody made them commit genocide. They are their own people, with their own culture, attitudes, beliefs, and minds. Sometimes they do good things and sometimes they do bad things. In the 1990s they committed a genocide, as many if not most other peoples in history have.
They did this for their own reasons, not because genius Belgians manipulated them into it. They did it because they're people just like you or me. Pretending that Belgians are uniquely awful and responsible for the actions of other people is just a different kind of paternal superiority.
> perhaps Belgians highlighted ethnic divisions between the two Bantu peoples
Basically, Belgians decided that one group was superior and cooperated with them. The other group was deemed inferior and treated rather badly. A lot of resentment followed. The groups were pre-existent, the level of resentment was not.
The genocide did not happened out of nowhere, the two groups hated each other ever since and committed small scale atrocities against each other after. Which created situation that was easy to be exploited in Rwandan internal power struggles.
So, it is combination of factors. The culture, attitudes and beliefs that caused genocide were the one growing from colonial system. The minds and decisions were Rwandans.
> To this day, Belgian schools do not in any way teach that Belgium is solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide in the early 90s.
I don’t want to minimize the atrocities of the Belgian Congo. But the Belgians are not and can never be held “solely responsible” for the Rwandan genocide. The agency, and the moral responsibility, for that genocide rests primarily in the hands that gripped those machetes and used them to gruesomely murder and dismember their neighbors, and those hands were not Belgian.
Everyone who has ever committed an atrocity had some historic excuse for it. The lesson of the 20th century is that no historical excuse or context provides a justification for mass murder. Belgians have committed horrible atrocities in the past, but that doesn’t justify or somehow transfer the blame for the atrocities committed by the descendants of their victims against each other.
Actually in the article he is criticising the whitewashing of BRITISH imperialism specifically, not European colonialism in general. Other countries are a lot more aware/self-reflective of their deeds while Britain still hangs on its 'noble' empire where the sun never sets.
Hopefully, they can preach by example. They need to recognize their bad actions, compensate the affected parties, educate their people, AND call on other governments perpetuating crimes against humanity.
As a Belgian, I felt inclined to comment. And give a bit of the perspective on it from here.
It's true that the Belgian colonial history slips under many people's radar, and I agree that it should be discussed more. Too few people know that more people died under Belgian colonialism than e.g. in the holocaust. (I guess that people historically were less bothered by the deaths of so called "primitive bush people" than "educated white europeans")
> Belgian schools do not in any way teach that Belgium is solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide
I disagree with this claim. Colonial history was taught in my school and iirc it's part of the obligatory high school curriculum. That being said, this was not the case some decades back, and awareness is definitely not on par with e.g. Germany. For example, there exists a "Leopold II street" not too far from me. Imagine having "Adolf Hitler street" as the main street trough a German town. Especially among the older generation there are still people of the "we also did a lot of good in the congo" opinion.
I feel that a lot of belgians kind of feel disconnected from the colonial atrocities. The colonies were a long way from belgium, and few people were involved or even knew about what happened there, far from actually going there. What further complicates the matter is that the during the initial (and most cruel) colonial period, the colony was not actually property of Belgium, but of the belgian king. Hence the government and some people feel like they had little to do with it.
These reasons do not justify the ignorance, but do in some part explain it.
On a similar note, you claim that Belgium is "solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide", but said genocide occurred over 30 years after the Belgians had left. I'm certainly no expert on the matter, it's possible that this is an indirect result of the colonial administration, but I find the "solely" a bit reductionist. Neighbouring tribes were killing opposing tribes before the europeans arrived. (Although I'm sure the colonizers exacerbated this to play divida et concera). I'm not saying the belgians are not to blame, just saying that this is a nuanced discussion.
> To be clear, it's the system and leadership that I struggle with. Not the citizens.
This is indeed an important distinction to make. I feel that making sweeping claims like "Belgium has an evil, brutal and vile history" will cause people to feel attacked. It's counterproductive and will make people deny your real points. "I am Belgian and did not commit crimes so I guess his broader statements are false too"
> Belgium isn't about chocolate, it's a country which is completely fine with not teaching its citizens about the common practice of chopping off children's
I disagree. Belgium _is_ about chocolate. But it's also about a lot of different things. The history _is_ taught. But a country is not defined by the bloody pages in it's history book. Just like germany is not defined by the nazi's or americans are not defined by their genocide of the natives. I feel the past is too complicated to allow general statements about "country X" is good and "country Y" is bad.
> And those people want to tell China something about human rights, yelling from some tower in Brussels. It's breathtaking.
In contrary, the crimes of our forefathers just only fuel us to fight harder for our fellow humans.
If a private enterprise commits atrocities in its pursuit of greed, the compatriots of the CEO usually have fairy little agency in or even knowledge of the matter, even if that CEO also held some public office.
It would be wise to point at the real perpetrators such as Leopold II and other financiers and executors involved rather than 'Belgians'.
>The atrocities and genocides that Europeans brought to the world for centuries should be focused on deeply. Context: I am European and disgusted with the way we treat our impact on the world.
Well, depends on the Europeans. Some of us Europeans have been victims, rather than perpetators of colonialism for example...
I broadly agree with you, but think there’s a danger there of going too far in reducing culture and belief systems to simple “customs”.
Bret Devereaux, for one, constantly reiterates on his (awesome) blog you linked that people in the past really did often act, relate, and believe very differently than we do.
Anachronism is a trap just as much as romanticism, only from the opposite extreme.
The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.
-L.P. Hartley
Try watching old movies, something from before WW2. The scripts and the acting aren't just different because of tech, but because the people are different. The similarities, usually in the vices and not the virtues, are eye opening too.
Now that 'drift' from our reality continues all the way into the past, sometimes with violent changes, sometimes more slowly.
The later Medieval period was one of great economic and population expansion. However, the rise of famine due to too many people to feed without any increase in agricultural production was a big problem in Northern Europe (1315-1317. Of course the arrival of the bubonic plague would then push the population levels further down. Parts of Europe did indeed enter a "Dark Ages" after the fall of the Roman Empire. England was hit particularly hard after the Roman withdrawal , as was the Italian Peninsula after the Gothic Wars, the arrival of the first bubonic plague, and the worsening of the general climate during this time period (560s CE)
>That completely got wrong what the Medieval period really was - the transition from Roman imperial rule to early-modern European states, and a small industrial revolution in technology including agriculture and navigation.
The Dark Ages are from ~500AD to ~900AD and as a term were first used in the 14th century. I don't know how else you would describe a period in which population was reduced to less than a quarter of what it had been at the peak of the Pax Romana.
I don't know why you are down voted, what you are saying is factually correct and the comment you responded to was wrong about the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages preceded the Medieval Period.
I always thought that the Dark Ages /was/ the middle ages and that dark referred (at least initially) to the lack of records.
Wikipedia agrees but I am certainly no expert in this:
The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Early Middle Ages or Middle Ages, that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.[1][2]
Petrarch, who conceived the idea of a European "Dark Age". From Cycle of Famous Men and Women, Andrea di Bartolo di Bargilla, c. 1450
The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (lack of records) with earlier and later periods of "light" (abundance of records).
>The Dark Ages are from ~500AD to ~900AD and as a term were first used in the 14th century.
Petrarch, the 14th C dude you're referencing, believed in a two age history demarcated by the fall of Rome and that he was living in dark, post-Roman world. The three age history of light-dark-light that would give us the term middle ages/medieval wouldn't come til the 15th C with Bruni when he tacked a modern age onto Petrarch's scheme.
From what I've read, Petrarch did hope for some sort of Roman revival - so arguably, he can be seen as a spiritual successor to the three age approach...
It’s important to emphasize that feudalism is fundamentally a transactional system. What the nobility had to offer peasants was safety. In the absence of the Roman imperial system, binding yourself to a local lord who could raise men at arms and a small castle to protect you and your family is a rational decision. I wouldn’t go so far as saying that feudalism is good, but it’s at least understandable when viewed that way.
Of course late feudalism became extra intolerable once kings stopped protecting peasants and started pulling them into new wars instead.
A small castle was also an ideal location from which to terrorize and pillage the surrounding countryside, so not too unlike transacting safety for your store from the local mob.
Historian here. That's a generalization. Manor lords did not "terrorize and pillage" the surrounding countryside.
Have you read the article? I can tell you it's a correct summary of an established views on medieval society, such as it is.
A common misconception is to view medieval serfs, free peasants and wage laborers as "oppressed masses" from a modern perspective, colored with romantic glasses from 19th century tales such as Robin Hood or Ivan Hoe. That's just incorrect.
Sure, there were plenty of peasant revolts (Jacquerie - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquerie) against the nobility. Both those were generally not against the foundations of the societal system from which manor lords derived their authority, but rather prompted by the precarious living conditions these groups found themselves in.
People didn't revolt because they felt "oppressed or terrorized", they would revolt when they got too hungry or felt unprotected.
The Jacquerie happened against the backdrop of the 100 years war. Warbands consisting of unemployed English, German and Spanish mercenaries roamed the French countryside. French nobility was pretty much powerless to do anything at the time. That's what prompted the lower classes, who felt unprotected, to engage in a violent uprising.
Most of the times, the legal framework which governed the relationship with a manor lord wasn't questioned since that's what provided a sense of stability and order.
Also, the "medieval age" spans 1.000 years if you use commonly accepted termini ab quo / ad quem (476 - 1453). But manorialism itself extended well into the pre-modern age up to the French Revolution and, depending on where you lived, well into the 19th century (Russia, serfdom was abolished in 1861). It certainly wasn't a catch all system: there were many variations and adaptations.
Because the same argument could be made about literally any authority. Whether it's an autocratic rule, a modern democratic state, a feudal lord or a mob boss.
What makes all the difference is how "good" gets defined. You, I and the next person will likely have differing opinions on that. And I'm pretty sure that the medieval precariat and nobility will have an entirely different perspective on that as well.
Medieval times weren't lawless times either. The legal framework at the time was based on customary laws which eventually evolved and coalesced into the formal legal systems we know today. Common Law as it first originated in England is rooted in such customary laws.
As far as "terror" is concerned: the notion of "human rights" is quite modern and only started to become widespread during the late 18th century. Torture, corporal and capital punishment were par for the course in severe criminal cases.
These weren't times where one enjoyed the same freedoms as one does today either. But that doesn't mean people were constantly and randomly subjected to horrible fates at the slightest perceived transgression either.
Moreover, rather inhumane methods of asserting and delivering justice rooted in Frankish, Germanic, Saxon or Nordic traditions were rooted out rather early. Trial by ordeal was abolished by the Church in the early 13th century, for instance.
As I said, we're discussing over 1.000 years of history. And depending on the time and location, you'd be more or less at risk of finding yourself at the tentative mercy of authority such as it ruled.
Exactly, it was a protection racket. And like all protection brackets some people romanticize them (I've come across this view multiple time in my home town, Belfast, where paramilitaries have offered this "service" to small businesses).
Also it's worth pointing out that literacy rates across Europe plummeted as the Roman empire fell apart. I read that even Charlemagne "struggled with his letters".
Charlemagne struggled with writing the incredibly arcane Merovingian script [1]. That's the very reason he came up with the Carolingian script [2] the very print script you're reading this message with is descended from and the reason why he implemented school reforms.
Why would you terrorize your own workforce and pillage your own assets ?
Feudalism was largely rooted in the Late Roman fiscal system that incentivized industrialized agriculture with large estates and self-sufficient villas in Gaul and Britain. When imperial authority failed they became political forces, and the regional military forces started acting out as peace-breaker and eventually became sovereign polities (the so-called barbarian kingdoms).
Nowadays historians have become increasingly suspicious of Late Roman land-owners, as there are quite a few known cases of families switching from seemingly Latin names to seemingly Germanic ones.
The Medieval castle's just a villa with a military streak. The purpose isn't as much pillaging the direct surroundings as it is to protect your assets from the next land-owner over.
I would also bet that if the peasants had a sufficiently thorough history, they would probably hate first peasants to have entered into serfdom for protection. While that might have seemed like a good idea right after the fall of Rome, it probably looked less good a few centuries later.
Yup. To the point that guilds in the late Middle Ages started recruiting their own militias to protect their trade from "nobility" (i.e. thugs with castles).
Peasant did not bound himself to castle. Peasant was bound to castle by whoever ruled the place and decided to assign this or that person to administer the land.
Peasants did not had all that much say in that choice.
At least in Poland, in the later centuries, it was pretty much slavery. Escaped peasants were hunted across the country. The punishments for escape were severe, and sometimes included mutilations which precluded the escapees from running but didn't hurt their farming abilities.
Peasants weren't exactly property like for example in the US, but in practice were bought and sold with the land (number of people living on a land was a large part of valuation) and could be mistreated or killed with no legal recourse.
Not saying that peasants in Poland-Lithuania were in an enviable position, but this line of comparison is advanced by some popular non-historians: I'd say, to get some "cool" surface analogies to the US. Slavery would be more if there were an option of taking or leaving your peasants with property as you like. It's hard to imagine for the nobility to ignore the manpower in valuation. And there was still some actual slavery in Lithuania (small scale) and Russia, and also if you'd be kidnapped by Tatars and sold somewhere in the Ottoman Empire. The latter was a fairly common thing in some parts of the country.
Peasants, as opposed to slaves, were integrated into the civil society, although on very disadvantageous terms. Even on private land, they had their own judicial "councils" (look up 'sąd dominialny'), of course entirely on the mercy of the lord in practice. (There was also the state/crown land with marginally better conditions.)
All this didn't stray qualitatively from the broad Eastern European baseline. A Russian, Prussian or Hungarian noble wouldn't get punished for killing his peasant either, unless he'd seriously screw up his relations with the local regime. A French one pre-1789 would have to play his cards right. PLC got much flak in the period for peasant oppression because 1. it often didn't have raw political power to distract from it 2. there was the perceived hypocrisy in its political system, very loud about liberty, equality etc.
> I didn’t say they bound themselves to a castle, I said they bound themselves to someone who could raise a castle.
Except as I told, they did not made that choice. People who could raise the castle decided by themselves where they want castles. Castles were military and administrative buildings for actual powers.
You get to rule that land in exchange for set days of military service for king and in exchange of ensuring taxes are collected. Peasants opinions were not important.
> And I’m sure the first peasants had some choice. Later ones ... not so much.
I don’t see how democracy is much different, to be quite honest. The same structures get set up (the state, instead of a Lord, provides security ... over time the state drags the “citizens” into new wars all the same). I suppose the difference is that in a democracy you at least have an illusion of influence on the state, whereas in a Feudalistic society everyone was quite honest about how the peasants had no or only limited influence at best.
This is ignoring all of the details. Feudal peasants were much closer to slaves than to citizens in a democracy. They had a duty to produce certain amounts of resources for the lord - often not a percentage like a tax, but a minimum amount due. In many places at many times, they were bound to the land - they were not allowed to move away from the village where they lived, definitely not to a different Lord's lands. As you also note, they had no power to influence decision making, and even if they did rise up, they were violently put down, by neighboring lords if they somehow were successful against their own.
Not to mention, (modern) states offer much more than military security. They offer healthcare, food, care for the disabled, infrastructure, education, and many other services. And, especially in smaller nations or at local levels (think town, not US state), there is quite a lot of real democratic power, certainly incomparable to the realities of serfdom.
Look, I’m not making an argument in favor of serfdom (far from it). I’m pointing out that many current iterations of democracy have become quite corrupt, so much so that the difference between it and feudalism is one measured on the margins (your details). Every couple days an article gets upvoted on this website that describes how the economies in (western) democracies have metastasized to the point where it’s participants are just cogs, working for a massive corporate enterprise that explicitly does not care about them, voting in elections about a government that quite often does the opposite of what is in their expressed interests, and/or are stuck in an infinite loop of debt-enabled credentialism.
Okay yeah that’s not de jure feudalism. Inching closer and closer to de facto, though.
Edit: to say this again, because apparently it’s needed. I am not in favor of feudalism.
But still lightyears off. You are dramatizing our priviledged existence. Billions (literal) would offer their firstborn son to be "cogs" working a "massive corporate enterprise". What you are describing is the good part of modern life, I suggest you don't look at the bad parts if this already disturbs your soul.
I didn't take your comments as being in favor of feudalism, I took it as being a bit too cynical of modern states. The clarifications in your new comment make it clearer that you are more talking about a direction, not saying we already live in neo-feudalism, and I agree with you completely that it is something we're inching towards.
Thanks, and yes I should’ve been more clear about my intent. I am a defender of democracy, and what I said should’ve been better placed in the context of what I actually mean. Namely, the decay of competency and the corruption we see in many democracies will drift to a point where the situations of their citizens start to mimic or echo a version of feudalism.
> This is ignoring all of the details. Feudal peasants were much closer to slaves than to citizens in a democracy.
I disagree. We overestimate the freedom we have and underestimate theirs.
For example they had much more free time than we do today. We on the other hand are still "free" to choose where to work (as long as we aren't in poverty, which is unfortunately untrue for too many, with no prospect of future change), but the workplace is as undemocratic as it gets.
Forget our (tech) golden workplaces. Most people spend 2/3 of their lives in authoritarian workplaces that they can't leave because they need their shit job to survive.
Where is the practical difference with being a serf?
Even in the west, most of us don't live a democracy, except for the minority of their time.
If you’ve left your town without your landlords permission, you enjoy a freedom that medieval peasants didn’t have. If your apartment changed hands without you suddenly becoming someone’s property, you’ve enjoyed a freedom peasants didn’t have. If you’ve been involved in a legal process that wasn’t adjudicated by your land lord then you’ve enjoyed a freedom peasants didn’t have.
I can’t believe I need to explain this, but democracy is nothing like feudalism.
Actually, most parts of medieval society were astoundingly mobile. Not everyone was tenant or serf, many, as in the trades and crafts, workers of all kind and everyone involved in moving goods, were often travelling and surprisingly mobile, as were the ruling class. Mind that this was before settled living became the standard model. (Which happened in continental Europe only in the 18th century.)
In fact you aren't allowed to leave the country if the state doesn't allow it. You equate two concepts together because the words are similar (lord and landlord) but that's childish. It's obvious a lord back in the is much closet to a governments then a landlord.
Most serfs weren’t slaves[0], true. But in many areas serfs were legally bound to the land that they occupied. If that land changed hands, so did the serfs legally. That’s no slavery, but it’s also far worse than being a freeman.
In all areas they had fewer rights and more obligations than freemen; there’s a reason why being reduced to serfdom was often done out of economic need, and why freedom often had to be bought.
0 - Some types of serfs were literally slaves and could be traded as such. See Russian Kholops.
Do you think I’m making an argument in favor of feudalism? I’m sorry that pointing out that our current structures of government aren’t exactly performing at their presumed capacity is a troubling idea.
You’re getting downvoted because our current system of government, no matter how flawed, is very different from feudalism. The comparison is poor for all the reasons I listed and more.
There are better ways to critique our current system without such hamfisted comparisons.
The dark ages is not a synonym for the medieval era. It's a sub-division of the medieval era - one of three.
The dark ages is a period after the fall of Rome. It's named for the fact that very little written output was produced during this time. It ran about 500-1000AD.
The high middle ages came after, and there was a lot more writing going on during this period. This was about 1000-1250AD. When people think 'medieval', this is usually what they think, if not the late medieval period (the third sub-division).
Then came the Renaissance, then the modern period.
The dark ages actually were pretty dark, mysterious, and primitive, as evidenced by the very low intellectual and cultural output during these years, low populations, low levels of social organization, and so on. Generally, the good parts and achievements of the medieval period that you're gesturing at were during the high and late parts.
> The dark ages is not a synonym for the medieval era.
Actually, it originally was. The "Dark Ages" was coined during the late Middle Ages/early Renaissance to refer to the entire period following the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of "modern" knowledge. It's only recently (20th century) that the term is shrunk back to refer to the Early Medieval period.
> It's named for the fact that very little written output was produced during this time. It ran about 500-1000AD.
There's your problem. The drought of manuscripts runs from about 500-800; the Carolingian Renaissance (and Albert the Great's concomitant reforms) brings back the manuscript production.
Just because the boundaries are fuzzy doesn't necessarily invalidate the concept of a 'dark age'.
If you don't like the term, we could call it "the age where total population, urbanization levels, manuscript production, trade volume, lead pollution, [placeholder for other convenient or inconvenient metric] in Europe[1] stayed far below peak Roman levels" - but that's kind of a mouthful...
[1] 'western' Europe in particular, but some of the effects are visible at continental scale, or even globally
Indeed, and the Carolignian Empire, at its height, had united almost all of Western Europe again and led directly to France and the HRE as successor states. If you look at the conquest and governmental structures in the Carolignian Emprie, you'd have a very hard time arguing that they were undeveloped, locked in a "dark age".
None of this is true... politics mainly happened at the local level because the imperial Roman empire was destroyed, but that only changed development and innovation. Have you ever read Beowulf? It is one of the most highly developed pieces of Old English poetry, at 3000 lines, and was written in this time period. Silver mining increased, and many technological innovations like iron plows emerged. Beautiful cathedrals were constructed in the Romanesque style, and learning continued in monastical schools all over Europe.
There was international trade and military activity ranging from Scandinavian societies raiding into Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as the Crusades starting up near the end of this period. The Christian church of the Roman empire, otherwise known as the Roman Catholic Church, was alive and well, becoming one of the most powerful institutions for the next several hundred centuries. "Dark Ages" is an antiquated term - think transition, not Camelot (although the legend did originate in this period). It is often called the "Early Middle Ages" these days.
>That completely got wrong what the Medieval period really was - the transition from Roman imperial rule to early-modern European states, and a small industrial revolution in technology including agriculture and navigation.
Well, not that wrong, as the "transition from Roman imperial rule" (in the Western part of the empire) was followed by huge decline in government, standards of living, safety, and so on, that lasted many centuries.
(There's a recent trend to downplay this, as there was a trend to overplay how dark the dark ages where in the past. But if one can see through the temporal trends in the historical discipline, they can also see that those times were bad, and the numbers and facts support this).
"The Dark Ages" is not a synonym for The Middle Ages. It refers to the period of 5th-10th century, when Europe experienced its biggest cultural stagnation.
It's not to say that the rest of The Middle Ages was particularly innovative, but The Dark Ages were the The Middle Ages of The Middle Ages.
>there were exceptions to the rule like prosperous city-republics.
This seemed to start because of the "compromise" status of Venice and Rome after Charlemagne's conquest of Italy; after that the floodgates opened and other cities tried to get away with it. A thousand years later, the kings have finally been kicked out (mostly).
So I appreciate what you're saying but the "people are people" argument... has limits.
One of the most interesting things I find about ancient history is just how _alien_ the culture must've been. The problem with a lot of historical texts is no one thinks to write down what to them is mundane or ordinary and it doesn't take long until the mundane becomes almost incomprehensible.
Thing is, you don't need to go back thousands of years to see this. Even 100 years ago you find totally different attitudes (eg the willingness to be conscripted and to volunteer to go to war).
Go back a little further and you find the culture shock to Victorian England with Pacific cultures.
My point is it can be a bit of a trap to take too much for granted in terms of a human baseline.
Willingness to be conscripted? Different styles of dress? Different approaches to life? Sure it would be a culture shock and strange, but the culture as a whole would not be alien. If we had a day just to shadow/hang around in the company of these people (you can still travel to areas where people practice indigenous lifestyles, for example) we would find them to be not much different than us.
Despite their strange practices, this is what is normal to them, and they aren't any less human whether in the form of perfection or fallibility. They worry about the future, love their families, have wants and ambitions, get angry sometimes, and have their biases. We would find them to be comically relatable to your life, just in a different form.
Sure, but I think that’s the point being made here. They are humans, but they are different in very appreciable ways. Though we would ultimately share many similarities, as all of humanity has throughout history, there would undoubtedly be major cultural differences.
I had the sense in my education that dubbing it the Dark Ages was a way of diverting attention away from it. This large block of time was the period of the Crusades, Reformation, antipopes, etc. No shortage of interesting happenings during this period, but the education system does not want to touch that with a 10-foot pole, nor the leadership. It's too close to the topic of religious strife and atrocities. This might become less true as Christianity gets less ubiquitous. Nationalism might be another reason that it's cast aside.
The #1 misguided belief among the general population is how the Reinassance came to be. And that misguided belief has been driven by revisionism.
We are happy to talk about Ancient Greece, but when it comes to talking about the influence of the Umayyad Caliphate in Europe, then people quickly become aggressive and start saying "no, no, no, we don't talk about this here".
Why? because the Islamic civilization were our rivals and acknowledging that we owe them our modern lifestyle is highly taboo, especially among people with Conservative views.
You are quite right. A lot of people underestimate the international connections a specific local place had at some time in history, this is the case with Europe as well. After the Roman Empire fell, its knowledge, writings, and customs were somewhat preserved in Western Europe, but their real preservation and translation occurred in the Byzantine Empire and Islamic world. Then in the 15th century the lifestyle, innovations, and preserved writings from these places and others as far as China gained traction in Europe again. This helped kick-start the Renaissance.
I'm being a little pedantic, but this is a little misleading:
> After the Roman Empire fell, its knowledge, writings, and customs were somewhat preserved in Western Europe, but their real preservation and translation occurred in the Byzantine Empire
This is, of course, because the 'Byzantine' Empire was the Roman Empire, and continued to operate as such for almost a millennia after its loss of territories in the West, some of which it regained and lost again during that time.
> and Islamic world.
Many, many texts were lost and destroyed during the very violent Muslim conquests. It wasn't until much later that mostly ex-Roman and ex-Persian subjects began reviving learning from what had survived.
> hen in the 15th century the lifestyle, innovations, and preserved writings from these places and others as far as China gained traction in Europe again.
An important factor in this was the threatened, and then eventual, destruction of the Roman capital, Constantinople. Learned scholars fled as refugees to the west, bringing their books with them. Without the Turks destroying what was left of the Roman Empire, there might have been no Renaissance.
Indeed, it's almost a meme at this point how many people on r/AskHistorians ask the same questions about the Roman Empire repeatedly yet it gets a fraction of the questions (or interest) in the Islamic empires. The entire Middle Ages and Renaissance were sharply defined by the Western response to the Islamic empires of the region, from the Reconquista to the Crusades.
Not only is Charles Martel (and to a lesser extent, his father who seemed to be a nobody before taking over Francia) one of histories absolute badasses, but the Carolingian Renaissance basically created the Catholic Church as we know it (and as we think about it in history) and brought writing back to the mainstream in Europe which eventually allowed what we know as the Renaissance to even take off.
It’s a shame that outside of historical circles and the well read nobody knows who Charlemagne is, or they know he was a person but have no idea what he did. To me the “Dark Ages” are just as, if not more, fascinating that the Imperial era of Rome. I also do think that (Dark Ages) is a good term if applied a little earlier to right after the fall of Rome until the rise of Charlemagne.
> It’s a shame that outside of historical circles and the well read nobody knows who Charlemagne is
Except for all the French, and neighbouring French-speaking countries... (and probably other European countries, but I wasn't exposed to their education system).
I'm on the other side of Germany (Czechia) and everybody knows who Charlemagne is, it's basic education here, you learn it in 6th grade. It's not that positive figure here though, Czech people didn't submit willingly to his empire.
>and to a lesser extent, his father who seemed to be a nobody before taking over Francia
Pepin of Heristal was the most powerful man of Austrasia, from one of the most powerful families in the Frankish world (descended from Rhenan Frankish royalty). His ancestry includes extremely prestigious bishops and lords.
Charlemagne (or Karel de Grote as we call him in Dutch) is a pretty big deal in our history. We've learned about him in primary school and again, somewhat more in depth, in secondary school.
Of course not everyone knows what he did. Most people aren't all that interested in history. You could say the same thing about most historical figures. As a quick guess Julius Caesar, Napoleon and Hitler are the most obvious of a pretty short list of counterexamples that are so well-known that almost everybody has at least some idea of what they did. Even that is going to be pretty limited: I suppose a lot of people here in Belgium are aware of Caesar because he came here to conquer, and provides the oldest written sources of our regions. But not a lot of people are aware of his role in the end of the Roman Republic.
All children in France know Charlemagne for his beard and mustache, and the fact that this asshole invented the schools they have to sit in to learn about him.
You mean the influence where they sacked Constantinople in 1453 after centuries of attempts, destroying the Christian Byzantine empire and sending huge numbers of Byzantine writers and intellectuals fleeing to settle in Europe?
I mean if we look at the time period... everybody did this to everyone. European states had bloody dynastic and religious wars. The intrigues of city-states on the Italian peninsula created one of the most treacherous political environments of all time, inspiring Machiavelli to write his renowned book on power. In the half-century prior, England invaded France and ravaged for a hundred years, and Europeans regularly attacked Islamic empires in the Middle East.
It was bloody all around, because there wasn't a whole lot of stability. But this didn't stop these different cultures from exchanging knowledge and goods as well, as Islamic empires, Italian merchants, and other players all had high levels of development and innovations that were quickly copied. I'm sure the sacking of Constantinople did lead to an influx of knowledge into Western Europe, but it was all these different factors that led to the appearance of the Renaissance.
Of course, I'd never suggest a single-cause explanation. And as someone else pointed out, there were lots of advances happening before 1453 as well. I think the sack of Constantiople really threw gas on the coals though.
It was an exceptional event. Most wars in that era were nobles fighting over thrones; the Islamic invasions were a bit more intense than that in that they were from a totally separate religio-cultural tradition and would overturn the entire power structure and ultimately even push peasants to convert.
In a war between kings of the same religion, the priests/imams and lower nobles (i.e. intellectual and writer classes) could potentially stay in their posts even as the front line moved over them. Not so true when it's an entirely different religion.
I think “Islamic Invasions” is a bit too broad of a term. You are referencing the Ottoman Turks specifically.
The funny thing is that Ottomans saw this whole event through a very different lens. They didn’t call themselves the Ottomans or Turks. They, along with their predecessors The Sultanate of Rum (Rome), and the Seljuks, considered themselves the continuation of the Roman Empire.
After the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II crowned himself the Caesar of the Roman Empire.
Turks waged a war of expansion to reclaim the Roman Empire for themselves. The religion was just a side effect.
Yeah I guess the calling it a cultural continuation of Rome is wrong.
It's kind of hard to describe this in words because "culture" implies so many things like language, customs, and religion. The "Turkish Rome" didn't really inherit any of those traits.
However, while this probably originated just as a manufactured claim, a casus belli for the Roman lands, over time it seems to have still evolved into something a bit more. Owning Constantinople didn't make people Roman in terms of culture, but it did make them an empire. Sulatane of Rum existed next to Rome for many years and seems to have considered itself a "better Rome than existing Rome".
Makes me think of a parallel with the Holy Roman Empire, which similarly clung on to the title, but not the culture of Rome.
"After the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II crowned himself the Caesar of the Roman Empire."
Well yes, that's how feudal systems work. If you take over a country, you get to have its titles. This is how e.g. an English king could conquer Scotland and crown himself king of Scotland. It doesn't mean he always identified as Scottish.
The language "reclaim the Roman empire" is really a stretch since it implies that the Ottomans had some sort of self-image as the natural heirs to Rome before they took Constantinople. Is there any evidence for this?
Why would they need to conquer Constantinople to do this, given that the Byzantines weren't trying to conquer, y'know, actual Rome?
I'm not saying you're wrong. People come up with lots of rationales for wars. And claiming historical right is a popular one, but that goes alongside other motivations as well.
My outside-view assumption would be that this is modern-day politically-motivated interpretation. These days, progressives rules the universities and the history departments. Therefore, they want to advance progressive goals. The see Muslims as a victim class, which means they don't want Islam to be seen in a negative light. Therefore, they would want to avoid historical interpretations wherein Muslims are conquering for self-understood religious reasons like ISIS did so recently. So I think they'd come up with something like, "Oh no, the Ottomans just wanted to reclaim their Rome."
Any time you read history you need to take into account the incentives faced by the people writing it.
In any case, when I refer to Islamic invasions I'm referring to the whole string of them going back to the Abbasid Caliphate - the conquest of Egypt, Arabia, Persia, all of north Africa, Spain, India, etc etc motivated by a self-declared doctrine of holy war (itself used for political ends by individual rulers, of course). I see Constantinople 1453 as just one small episode in this 1400-year story.
The Byzantines (I prefer to call them the ERE, but I'll call them the Byzantines as it's more recognized in lay discourse) had been under threat for a long time, and if the Turks hadn't sacked Istanbul/Constantinople, some other polity would have. Western Europeans sacked Istanbul/Constantinople in 1204 and ruled it as part of the Latin Empire until 1261, when it was retaken. The Byzantines ran into trouble with the Bulgarian kingdoms and the Kievan Rus constantly, along with their Islamic neighbors. If it wasn't the Turks it would have probably been the Bulgars or the Rus.
Just calling them "Byzantine" itself is a fun piece of revisionism that the West has adopted. The Byzantines saw themselves as Roman, called themselves Roman, and viewed themselves as a continuation of the Roman Empire. It was Western ambitions in Jerusalem and through the Western Catholic Church that caused this distinction to be so heavily emphasized by the West.
And basically immediately after this event, traders from Europe were interacting heavily with traders from the Islamic World. The focus on these military campaigns (Constantinople + Vienna being the big ones) is based on modern narratives around "the clash of civilizations", not actual history.
> The oldest known paper document in Europe is the Mozarab Missal of Silos from the 11th century, probably using paper made in the Islamic part of the Iberian Peninsula.
No paper = Books made out of parchements = Prohibitively expensive books = No libraries = No scholars
> The Alfonsine tables were the most popular astronomical tables in Europe and updated versions were regularly produced for three hundred years. Nicolaus Copernicus, known as the father of modern astronomy, bought a copy while at the University of Cracow.
No astronomic data = No modern astronomy = No laws of gravity and motion = No physics
> This period saw the beginning of the 'rediscovery' of many Greek works which had been lost to the Latin West. As early as the 10th century, scholars in Spain had begun to gather translated texts and, in the latter half of that century, began transmitting them to the rest of Europe.
No tolerance to science = Scientists harassed by the church = Science becomes impossible to conduct.
> The law eventually named after Snell was first accurately described by the Persian scientist Ibn Sahl at the Baghdad court in 984. In the manuscript On Burning Mirrors and Lenses, Sahl used the law to derive lens shapes that focus light with no geometric aberrations. The law was rediscovered by Thomas Harriot in 1602.
No optics = No astronomy = No age of exploration
No optics = No microscopes = No biology = No modern medicine
♦♦♦
... And the list goes on, and on, and on. The Reinassance is the legacy of the Islamic civilization. It is overwhelmingly clear. Your school teachers lied to you, and their teachers lied to them.
The first doctoral advisors were Islamic. Every known scientist is somehow a student of them. Follow the chain of doctoral advisors and learn the unavoidable truth.
Enjoy your new, more historically accurate perspective on the world. Downvote all you want, eventually your descendants will learn the truth in school one day anyways, when we are done undoing the revisionism.
It is your choice to trust whatever you want to trust. But if you have intellectual curiosity, you'll eventually arrive to a similar conclusion.
Have you ever asked yourself "how was paper adopted in europe?", "where do universities come from?", "what was needed in order to be a scientist in the middle ages?", if you haven't, try to find an answer to those questions.
There's a eurocentric answer to those questions, and a non-eurocentric answer. The eurocentric answer either ignores or downplays the importance of all the influence coming from the Islamic civilization through the Iberian peninsula and Italic peninsula.
The Renaissance undoubtedly owes a lot to medieval Islamic scholars. But to say that it's the "legacy of the Islamic world" implies a degree of continuity that just isn't true. The thinkers of the Renaissance didn't view themselves as inheritors of the Islamic scholarly tradition, and many saw the Muslim world as what we might call "scary foreigners" today; it does nobody any good to whitewash that.
The very fact that thinkers of the Renaissance thought that is itself a form of whitewashing. The very books that sparked the Renaissance were kept alive by the Islamic empires. The Renaissance thinkers, in order to advance their Christianity, wanted to ignore the Islamic contributions to their culture. In certain cases, like the Mozarabs and the Moors, Islamic architecture and customs deeply influenced what later became Catholic states. While the OP may be overly forceful, the repudiation of Islamic empires from the Middle Ages onward is a massive disservice to history. Let's not forget that the Ottomans were on the German side of WWI, the same state that traced its lineage through the Byzantines back to the ancient Islamic caliphates themselves.
Are you sure that people are denying what you think? I've never encountered a view contrary to what you're describing; the Islamic roots of algebra in particular are pretty well-known in my experience.
A sobering thought: when you consider that this is true for people we have come to demonize as well. Hitler, Vlad the Impaler, Genghis Khan ect ect they were all human with emotions, worries, good days and struggles. The only thing that separates us from them is what we think about what they did. A lot of people can’t process the idea of the worst criminals being people just like them or consider that deep down they are not moral, good or anything special and they themselves are capable of the same evil if placed in the correct circumstances.
With BLM I found myself thinking a lot about this question. Should we be understanding of slave owners and put them into hisorical context? Is it fair to hold people in the past to the morals of today? Where should the balance be struck?
I think the answer is that both things are true. Killing, abusing and enslaving people was always wrong. But the cognitive basis for those acts can be more mundane than pure evil.
I think as a society we experience a larger version of the free will problem. Our future path is tightly bound to our history and culture. We do not have complete free will. Breaking away an asserting agency can be be both an opportunity and a risk. Nelson Mandela broke with history but so did Hitler and Stalin. We shouldn't assume that we are the former.
> Is it fair to hold people in the past to the morals of today?
It's impossible, so it doesn't matter if it's fair: we’re not transporting reward or punishment back to people in the past.
Our decisions about who from the past we hold up as role models, and how, isn't about fairness to people in the past, it's about fairness to people in the present.
They are without empathy, remorse and able to manipulate people duplicating their behaviours and choices. This is both normal and extremist. People are still vulnerable to it today.
Please, please, good people. I am in haste. Who lives in that castle?
No one lives there.
Then who is your lord?
We don't have a lord.
What?!
I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as sort-of-executive officer for the week ... But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting...by a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs...but by a two thirds majority, in the case of more major...
Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
Order, eh? Who does he think he is?
I am your king!
Well I didn't vote for you.
You don't vote for kings!
How'd you become king, then?
The Lady of the Lake,... her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king!
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Be quiet!
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Shut up!
I mean, if I went 'round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!
Shut up! Will you shut up?!
Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system!
Shut up!
Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! HELP, HELP, I'M BEING REPRESSED!
> Clues about how privileged people in the Middle Ages regarded peasants can be found in their courtly songs, sarcastic proverbs, nasty jokes, and pious sermons. Knights and ladies were fond of songs known as pastourelles that told, among other things, about how easy it was for knights to have sex with peasant women or, failing that, to rape them; monks and students enjoyed jokes that portrayed peasants as ludicrously dumb and foolish; and priests, friars, and bishops preached sermons that depicted “those who work” as objects of pity, charity, and disgust. Even Piers Plowman, a sympathetic portrayal of rural life, portrayed the peasant’s lot as hard and pitiable. These literary texts are useful for understanding the often astoundingly negative attitudes of elites toward peasants, but they tell little about the peasants themselves.
They also seem useful to contrast the American / protestant view of work as the path to salvation with the European / catholic view of work as something pitiful
The "Protestant" work ethic existed before Protestentism. See for example:
> Andersen et al found that the location monasteries of the Catholic Order of Cistercians, and specifically their density, highly correlated to this work ethic in later centuries;[18] ninety percent of these monasteries were founded before the year 1300 AD. Joseph Henrich found that this correlation extends right up to the twenty-first century.[19]
That... doesn't make a lot of sense, at least on face value. In the Protestant view, your work (human effort) has no effect on your salvation. In the Catholic view, it has a lot to do with it.
>> They also seem useful to contrast the American / protestant view of work as the path to salvation with the European / catholic view of work as something pitiful
> That... doesn't make a lot of sense, at least on face value. In the Protestant view, your work (human effort) has no effect on your salvation. In the Catholic view, it has a lot to do with it.
I think he got it wrong. IIRC, the "Protestant work ethic" comes from a belief one's work ethic and success is proof of salivation, not the cause of it:
> Since it was impossible to know who was predestined, the notion developed that it might be possible to discern that a person was elect (predestined) by observing their way of life. Hard work and frugality were thought to be two important consequences of being one of the elect. Protestants were thus attracted to these qualities and supposed to strive for reaching them.
I don't think it's to do with salvation so much as the cultural views towards people.
Hearty, independent farmers, strong communitarian values, some degree of independence, faith and fealty are to be admired as virtuous, a form of 'working nobility'.
I don't think the contrasting view of them as 'lowly' has anything to do with faith or religion but rather just a measure of perspective in culture. Ancient world vs Newer World.
My grandparents were farmers, and were amazing people. I never worried about telling people that in North America. In many other parts of the world, it's the equivalent of saying "my grandparents were illiterate, stupid, servile, serfs".
In many parts of the world, a few generations ago it was either 'Rich and Powerful' or 'a Stupid, Servile, Plebe' and there really wasn't much in between, and that to have Money, Wealth and Power was to be something inherently admirable in and of itself.
Fair enough. I was responding specifically to the parent comment: "...contrast the American / protestant view of work as the path to salvation with the European / catholic view of work as something pitiful"
I think there's still more to understand re: "cultural view towards people" (the dynamics behind those views) in relation to a point that's central to the Catholic ethos operative then and now: Christ crucified, the power of God and the wisdom of God (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:18-31).
> We can especially study peasants in England because the archives there are especially full. In some cases, the superiority of English archives stems from the more careful record-keeping of its administrators, but, in most cases, it has been a matter of survival through the centuries. Thanks to a strong legal system, a relatively stable social order, and a hefty dose of luck, England’s medieval archives have survived especially well. In France, for example, many medieval archives were destroyed during the French Revolution, and in Scotland, untold thousands of state documents were lost when a ship carrying them sank in 1661. History is built on evidence, and if there is little evidence, historians have much less to study and much less to say.
I found it deeply ironic that you're replying to this:
>Is this a British centric view of history? It seems very one sided...
reply
With that quote.
This phrase:
>In some cases, the superiority of English archives stems from the more careful record-keeping of its administrators, but, in most cases, it has been a matter of survival through the centuries
Look at the words and order in which they appear "superiority", "careful record-keeping of its administrators". Starting from the lesser important cause to the main one, luck.
In fact what it's saying is:
> We can especially study peasants in England because the archives there are especially full, stemming from the simply fact that they survived through time, whereas in many other places they didn't due to many diverse factors"
It goes on on the following phrase:
> Thanks to a strong legal system, a relatively stable social order, and a hefty dose of luck, England’s medieval archives have survived especially well.
Again the wording and the order, luck is the last item, although in the writer's defence, they wrote "hefty dose of luck". Nonetheless, when you read that phrase the first thing that is imprinted is the "strong legal system", "relative stable social order", and lastly luck no matter how hefty.
And this is proved by the following remarks about how in France and Scotland a presumably high number of documents were lost, which invalidates the supposed "careful record-keeping" being a relevant reason. There's other examples where sacks, destruction or natural phenomena destroyed complete archives of many states, in Europe and elsewhere.
This is not to say that the conclusions of the article are wrong or that in fact English book keeping wasn't good or even better than any of the other mentioned here, in some, a few, many or all cases, it's just the way it's written.
I think it is worth pointing out that there is a cultural factor in the ordering of the reasons - in the UK, the most important item in a list is often placed last.
For example - a work colleague drops by. You discuss multiple things. On his way out he says "And by the way ...". That last point is the real reason he came to see you.
That's interesting and I didn't know that it was a common occurrence, although, still, in the example you showed wouldn't that be because it's being used in a face to face situation (or in writing if you're narrating human discourse, like in a novel, or something along those lines), the 'and by the way' has the effect of highlighting what comes after (and I would guess it isn't unique to British English but a common occurrence in many more languages/cultures).
Anyway, I just found it ironic in the context and I still see it as, consciously or not, that idea is projected by the choice of their words, specially given it's in written form, if this were two blokes talking to each other it would be different - and there's nothing wrong with it either way, plus, I can be wrong, which is fine too - the same way I don't want thought police for me I don't want it for anyone else either.
Isn't this the work by Max Weber? The main idea here is that predestination of Calvin believed that certain people were predestined for salvation, and others were not. But the implication is that material wealth is an indication of whether one is to be saved or not.
Weber points out that even though there were always wealthy classes all over the world - he is quite eclectic and treats ancient India, Babylon, China and Japan - modern capitalism and earning money for the sake of earning money, not for enjoying resulting luxuries, is Protestant in nature.
I am not an expert on Catholic viewpoint, but many religions (other than Calvinism as Weber sees it) tend to see wealth as a hindrance to salvation - e.g. camel through the eye of the needle etc. But the doctrine of karma etc. do tend to emphasize work for work's sake. So I am not sure I completely agree with Weber (he has works on Hinduism, Judaism etc. which are also insightful and unique takes on religion).
My ancestors were all farmers. I knew my great-grand dad when I was still a boy, he was born in 1900. I'm not a historian, so take my point of view with what I understand of how the "younger generations of farmers" thought.
I actually don't think they had it bad. Sure, they worked very hard, but that was their life. The good part is that they were fully self-reliant. They had food, were able to protect themselves, were able to fix anything that was broken, they had a strong community with the other farmers in the neighborhood. In rough times, I think this is very valuable.
I'm sure they didn't want to become knights and die in some war. Just because the scholars looked down on them, didn't mean they looked down on themselves, or were all stupid. Because back then you didn't have as much chances to study, I'm sure the intelligence of farmers was very diverse. About 50% of my cousins have a university degree, and most of the rest bachelor. So our genes can't be that stupid ;).
History told only from the winner's point of view is what makes a lot of people not know that the US lost Vietnam war.
Our generation is a bit worse than the previous ones in terms of how we preserve our culture and media. Digital media is way hard to preserve for posterity. That is why I think preserving geocities is so important. Long live the work made by archive.org and project gutenberg; they really deserve our respect.
>”... told only from the winner's point of view is what makes a lot of people not know that the US lost Vietnam war.”
This is confusing. VN winning means people don’t understand the US losing? Or VN wining meant they wanted others to believe the US won the war? Or the US actually lost but never the less your assertion doesn’t apply?
I think this is actually an interesting point because the US did lose the war but if the winner writes history, then why do so many think they won?
You have to look beyond the war. VN is doing well now, but overall the US is far richer and more powerful. So they are the "winner" in that sense and can project their view accordingly.
>> In Vietnam or China, it's common knowledge (and celebrated) that Vietnam won the war.
China celebrates Vietnam winning that war? Perhaps, but it'd be pretty surprising. Vietnam won it in spite of China. (The Soviet Union was a huge help though).
Happy New Year to both Vietnamese and Chinese peoples.
In US culturally influenced zones, like Brazil, most people think Vietnam lost the war. Most people I've talked to about it were surprised when I told them how the war ended.
From the PoV of domino theory, one supposes we did ultimately win with the fall of the USSR and thus the COMINT ceased to be a mortal threat to western socio-economic values.
Yes indeed. Dominoes and Matryoshka dolls - the smaller wars within the overarching cold war, which the US did win, despite losing some of the smaller but deadlier wars.
USSR lost to itself and its mortal corruption culminating in Chernobyl. US lost the moral war in VN, but learned to play to its strengths after that, to later outplay USSR as a whole.
History isn't written so much by the "winners" as "the people left in charge after the war". If the US and its South Vietnamese allies had won the war, the post-war characterisation of certain figures, philosophies and motivations in Vietnam would have been very different. Vietnam didn't however, win the war decisively enough to force a change of government to the US, and it suited the politicians still in charge of the US to downplay how important preventing communism from spreading in southeast Asia had once been and focus on how Cold War strategy switched to different theatres and approaches.
In many ways, digital is actually easier to preserve. Consider how many digital artifacts are surviving each year that give us detailed glimpses of daily lives as compared to physical goods that don’t tell much beyond the odd letter or two that survives. There’s more media soon than ever before and it survives in an accessible way longer than ever
The medieval period was a fairly long ordeal with large differences over both time and place.
Life post-black death in Europe, for example, included a heightened QoL for many as population density was lowered.
Many peasants in Europe had their own plot of land but also had to spend some time working his lords' fields. Often the lords had to supplement this with paid work - peasants did not particularly like giving away their labour for free and as such did not work very hard.
My source is Patrick Wyman's podcast "Tides of History". He has a PhD in history. He has a Substack also: https://patrickwyman.substack.com/ and another great podcast, "The Fall of Rome".
I cannot ensure that my assertions hold for all of Europe :-).
Bump Up Vote for "Tides of History" - it is an excellent podcast full of rich detail while also covering a lot of ground and explaining the macro picture.
When searching about for decent resources to help build a working hypothesis for worldbuilding in D&D, I came across bits on medieval demographics, sort of a "how many peasants do you need for the village to have its own blacksmith" deal.
Overall, a very grim view of the situation is a bit like trophic levels in a food web, with the farming peasants being the humble vegetation on which all others grazed, directly or indirectly. And certainly all of those tax records helped delineate just how much land was required. Fascinating stuff.
Little over hundred years ago, the dashing Dutch Historian Johan Huizinga wrote a book called: "The Autumn of the Middle Ages", with the subtitle: "A study of the forms of life, thought and art in France and the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries".
In it, Huizinga attempts to debunk some myths about the Middle Ages:
"[...] Huizinga presents the idea that the exaggerated formality and romanticism of late medieval court society was a defense mechanism against the constantly increasing violence and brutality of general society. He saw the period as one of pessimism, cultural exhaustion, and nostalgia, rather than of rebirth and optimism."
The original English translation is hard to read as he refers to many paintings in it, but no pictures. Luckily, on the book's hundred-year anniversary in 2020, a new, English translation (a tad expensive, though) with 300 full-colour illustrations was released.
In Italy we are lucky to have a very good medieval historian, professor Alessandro Barbero, who has done a great deal of work to popularize "peasant history" among the general public.
Most of his talks, are available on YouTube and are being collected in an increasingly popular podcast [1].
Once-obscure topics like the Ciompi revolt in Florence, the French Jacquerie, or the English peasants' revolt, are basically achieving memetic status.
The podcast is only in Italian, but it could be a useful tool to learn the language :)
There is also Ferdinand Braudel, who published 3 works about peasant live in the 15th to 18th century: "The Structures of Everyday Life", "The Wheels of Commerce" and "The Perspective of the World". I found them very interesting, they depict normal days for different trades and classes and the changes that occured to them over the centuries.
>monks and students enjoyed jokes that portrayed peasants as ludicrously dumb and foolish; and priests, friars, and bishops preached sermons that depicted “those who work” as objects of pity, charity, and disgust. Even Piers Plowman, a sympathetic portrayal of rural life, portrayed the peasant’s lot as hard and pitiable.
The more things change. The more things stay the same.
"Those who fight", in this case, means the military aristocracy.
Compare to the three estates of the French Ancien Régime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estates_of_the_realm#Kingdom_o...). The first estate was clergy (aka, "those who prey"). The second estate was nobility, original the "nobility of the sword" (aka "those who fight"), but later including administrators and judges as the "nobility of the robe". Note that the second estate was exempt from most taxes and forced labour, which underscores their power and prestige. And then the third estate was "everyone else", basically peasants, serfs, wage labourers, etc.
Brahmins, a scholarly class, have traditionally been atop the Hindu caste system in wide usage in South Asia for millenia, with Ksatriyas, the warrior class, below them. Not all societies view might as right. (And in fact, much of Asia has a history of assimilating, not coming under, invaders pre-British imperialism.)
> Brahmins, a scholarly class, have traditionally been atop the Hindu caste system in wide usage in South Asia for millenia
There's no real concrcete evidence for this. The British colonialists actually artificaly created most of the caste system rules and hardened them. Much like Leopold in Rwanda and the artificial invention of the Hutu vs Tutsi narrative which had devasting consequences later on.
"When the Belgian colonists conducted censuses, they wanted to identify the people throughout Rwanda-Burundi according to a simple classification scheme. They defined "Tutsi" as anyone owning more than ten cows (a sign of wealth) or with the physical feature of a longer nose, or longer neck, commonly associated with the Tutsi. "
What they're referring to here is that medieval European aristocrats were typically military aristocrats, with the power to personally command troops and fight wars in addition to administering their lands. Random farmers who got levied into an army wouldn't have gained high social status from it.
This came from the fact that in the early Middle Ages it seemed more feasible to pay your warriors with land than with money. Money was scarce and harder to use in a collapsed economy.
In the beginning, you had just the fighting men of your barbarian post-Roman kingdom. The barbarians had their military egalitarianism, but what remained from the Antiquity's culture perceived soldiers more like we do (as a specialized force and not as the societal elite).
The warriors (which became knights) were supposed to hold the land on the condition of military service. But it gradually became hereditary. Over the centuries, holding the main form of capital in the society gave knights high position and tremendous clout. (Note that the other big landowner was the Church.)
The article identifies 'those who fight' as knights. Knights often raised, resourced and commanded their own armies.
"As “those who work” (in Latin, laboratores), peasants supported people more privileged—“those who pray” (oratores) and “those who fight” (pugnatores). Each of these three orders ideally helped the other, with clergy contributing prayers and knights providing protection, but the mutuality of the system was more ideal than real. Also, the three groups were not equal. A peasant might have benefited from the prayers of a nun or from the protection offered by a knight, but a peasant was deemed to do work of lesser value and to be a less worthy person. Born into this unexalted state, a peasant’s lot was to labor for the benefit of others."
With the context given as High Middle Ages, "those who fight" primarily as in knights, with ideas around chivalry etc having strongly developed by then, and at least the "proper" knights being landed etc.
I am not a historian, but IIRC, warrior-nobilities were really not that uncommon before gunpowder was invented. Sparta had a (very cruel) one, Greece had one, etc.
Pretty shameless (though I don't think against the guidelines afaict), but my mother has written a series of novels that have a similar focus in terms of time period and section of society, for anyone who might be interested: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fortunes-Wheel-Meonbridge-Chronicle...
If you're interested in the topic of peasants of Europe a great book comes to mind: 'The Peasants' by nobel laureate Władysław Reymont.
It describes the life and customs of peasants during the four seasons. We're talking 19th century but the life and customs of peasants in that era haven't changed much except for extra rights they acquired in that century.
The article draws a distinction between the more modern Marxist definition of feudalism as a stage between slavery and capitalism and the medievalist one that describes "the customs and relationships of an elite who governed ordinary people by virtue of their military, political, and social power."
I feel our current model would merit a third definition. The demographic partition is similar to what is described in the article: a very large group of workers, a smaller group of more comfortable workers, and the capital holding elite. The main difference is that workers have a few more rights and a different relationship to the world, the clergy-analog workers have a physical role in the economy (in the sense that unlike with the social function of prayer, machines and systems of production and control have to be actually designed and implemented), and the elites are, due to the increased virtuality of the economy and the skills of the clergy-analog class that assists them, no longer subject to the same type of pressures and responsibilities as their blue-blooded forebears. Perhaps our generation's Thorstein Veblen will tackle the question of identifying what the customs and mechanisms of the current elite are in more detail.
A major factor is that in many/most area and periods a low-ranking member of the society (even a serf or sometimes a slave) was able to move, for example in order to escape from to much hardship by crossing the domain boundary (in stealth mode). This established a limit to the hardship enforced by a local power: too much of it, and too many will defect, either to the wilderness or to join another lord's domain (for example in some march).
This is less and less an option, as technical progress helps enforcing a rule.
We sure can read, however for many/most of us it is mainly "Manufacturing Consent" all day long, and thus a way for the establishment to manipulate us.
The popular view of all-powerful, romantic nobility and dumb peasants also comes from this mischaracterization. In reality, the period's instability after the Roman empire fell really made kings and nobles more akin to local warlords playing at Roman customs, and there were exceptions to the rule like prosperous city-republics. Peasant life was also sophisticated, rational, and complex, completely attuned to local weather and crop cycles. A good blog series goes into detail about this here:
https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
The important thing to realize is that no matter how difficult it was, how long ago it occurred, and how foreign the customs were for a certain period, people are still people. They have emotions, worries, good days, and struggles. If you take things in perspective and empathize with the people that preceded you on this world, history will lose a lot of its mystery.